Blues Progressions

Drop your attention to the very bottom of a song — that low, round thing you feel in your chest more than you hear. Almost nobody notices it, and it's holding the whole song together. The hidden engine. The bass's...

One beat-up upright, one player, and a left hand rolling like a freight train — and suddenly one person is the whole band. The most underappreciated instrument in blues rock: the piano. The barrelhouse: rough...

A few bucks, fits in your pocket, no strings or keys — and in the right hands, cupped around a mic, it moans like a sax and cuts through a whole band like a siren. The biggest small instrument in the blues. What a...

The problem amplification solved: guitar from background rhythm to lead voice Pickups, sustain, grit — why an electric guitar is a new instrument, not a loud acoustic Charlie Christian invents the guitar solo; T-Bone...

There's a sound in the blues that doesn't play notes so much as it cries them. That's slide guitar — the instrument that sounds most like a human voice weeping and singing at once. We start the series here. Why slide...

The finale brings it home to right now. Joe Bonamassa as the model for the modern DIY blues-rock empire (and his Royal Albert Hall night with Clapton); Gary Clark Jr. fusing the blues with everything modern ("This...

The loudest, most virtuosic chapter. The power trio as an invention (Cream) that forces the guitar into godhood; the extended live jam traced straight back to call-and-response; "Crossroads" as a Robert Johnson song...

The wilderness and the morning after. How disco, punk, new wave, and hair metal pushed blues rock to the margins (Muddy Waters died in '83; the industry called the blues a museum piece) — and how it survived underground...

The hinge of the series — the blues comes home to America, to Texas. The Lone Star blues bloodline (T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday," Lightnin' Hopkins, Freddie King); ZZ Top as a ferocious blues-rock power trio hiding...

Episode 4 is the legacy episode — the beautiful parts and the complicated parts both. How "classic rock" radio (AOR → tested song libraries c.1980) froze a handful of songs and shrank the genre to a postcard. The "Free...

The fuse from Episode 1 catches. How a generation of British kids fell for American blues records and handed the music back louder: Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated as the hub; the underground club scene (the Marquee...

The opener of a brand-new six-part series — with a warm welcome back to the Southern Rock (Southbound) crowd and an open door for newcomers. We define blues rock (the blues plus rock volume, drums, and attitude), then...

Fresh on the heels of my series on Southern Rock, I am launching the next series on Blues Rock starting July 17!

A band like Blackberry Smoke or the Marcus King Band walks out to a sold-out room tonight — and you can’t quite name what it is. Southern Rock? Blues-rock? Country? Americana? All of it? The finale brings the whole...

1980: Capricorn Records goes bankrupt and the press writes the obituary — Southern Rock is dead. They got it completely wrong. It didn’t die; it went underground, and the faithful kept the fire lit in the small rooms...